Article on AVC-to-HEVC transcoding accepted

Our article on AVC-to-HEVC transcoding has been accepted into the Springer Multimedia Tools ans Application Journal.

Together with Elie Mora and Frédéric Dufaux, we propose in this paper a method to reduce the complexity of the transcoding from the AVC format to the HEVC format. With respect to the reference “full decode-full encode” (FD-FE) technique, we reduce the depth of the HEVC quad-tree coding structure, based on the motion information retrieved from the AVC stream. In this way, we do not need to explore the full HEVC quad-tree, with a remarkable complexity reduction. We bet on the fact that our criterion would make the same choice as a full tree exploration.

Experiments confirm that the proposed technique is almost three times faster than the reference FD-FE (2.72x in the RA configuration, computed on all the sequences of the MPEG data set for RA), with a very small rate increase – 1.4% in average – for the same quality. These results are better than the state of the art.